API reference

[pdknsk]

Previously, Google would document functions, classes and (if applicable) exceptions for services, such as URLFetch. This has been replaced with a single API reference link that leads to auto-generated-from-source documentation. The formatting of the latter is poor. And you don't get exceptions, unless you notice that clicking next gets you to exceptions, usually.

There are more problems. An example. When you try to figure out the return value of set_multi_async(), you get this: See _set_multi_async_with_policy(). Which isn't mentioned in the documentation. So you might as well skip this new documentation and read the source.

https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/refdocs/google.appengine.api.memcache

I think this is a regression. It probably means less work for Google, but more work for users.

[Jared Bhatti]

We've recently updated our Python API docs to auto-generate content directly from code strings.  API documentation used to be hand-written and consistently out of date.  Our new process keeps API updates and documentation in sync.

Tech writers are working with the engineering teams to improve content and consistency of this new documentation.  We're still in the initial phase of rolling this change out.  If there are more ways we can improve this content, please let us know on this thread.